


The Dedication

by speakmefair



Category: Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Bad Jokes, Bad Writing, Horrible translations, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:50:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Three Musketeers Promptathon/Artathon on Live Journal</p>
<p>The prompt was: Aramis: "I'm broke, I'm hungry, and I can't make any extra money because I have writer's block and this ode isn't going to write itself!!!"<br/>Athos: "Would it help if I broke your heart?"<br/>Writer: *insert angry sex*</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dedication

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ElDiablito_SF](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/gifts).



Aramis was, in general, an uncongenial companion. He hated gambling, he rarely if ever drank even to mild excess, his sense of the appropriate veered between the incomprehensibly scandalous and a variety of pursed-mouth primness that would have defeated a Puritan at his closeted prayers, and he could pour cold water on any pleasurable intention for the sake of nothing more than a whim.

Athos never really understood why he sought out the man's company.

Unless, of course, it was because his deep and ineradicable sense of things that were right and just and deeply, blackly amusing had the patience to wait for moments such as these – Aramis in his shirt-sleeves and ink along the side of his face; his hair ruffled and on end where it wasn't limp with unwashed sleeplessness, and his whole being flashing the fire of pure and enormous frustration.

It was balm to Athos's soul.

He said so.

"That's not very nice of me, is it?" he added with malicious glee.

"No," Aramis agreed, "and it's not balm, either, you repulsive heathen, it's gloating."

"It is _also_ gloating," Athos agreed happily. "Quiet gloating. Delicious, lovely gloating. A rare pleasure, and one to be savoured –"

"My God, can you not shut up when you should? Nine and a half times out of the proverbial ten, words from you are like comprehensible behaviour from Richelieu himself, and as much to be desired, and when I would gladly pay money –"

"The money you don't have?"

"-- _yes_ , quite, the money I _don't have_ , thank you very much indeed for reminding me of this, the money I am in fact completely _lacking_ , for you to please, please, _please_ employ your usual method of brooding and sullen silence, what do you do? What do you choose to inflict me with? A veritable storm of words, a hurricane of despair from some unimaginable inferno!"

"I admire you also," Athos said, and was fairly sure that his voice sounded just like the evil grin he could not quite bring himself to force his face to employ. It was simply too much movement and effort to contemplate, when his tone could do as well.

Aramis sighed, and put his pen down with a care that bespoke of fettered violence. "Athos," he said with a patience that was not so much strained as utterly and completely frayed through to its last tenuous thread of existence, "Thanks to my having lent you all my pay, and your losing it on one turn of some very dubious cards, I'm broke, I'm hungry, and I can't make any extra money because I have writer's block and this ode isn't going to write itself!"

Athos smiled at him with an entirely spurious sweetness. "Would it help if I broke your heart?"

Aramis stared at him with his mouth slightly and unattractively open and rather slack at the edges. "No?" he said cautiously, and then, more coherently, "What? No. _Why_ do you say this sort of thing, _why_ , do I look in need of being driven further towards insanity?"

"Always," Athos said, and refilled his cup from the wine bottle he had brought officially to 'lubricate the creative flow' and promptly commandeered for his own enjoyment. He tilted his head to the side. "Not at this precise moment, of course, but in general –"

Aramis threw the ink-pot at him. His aim was very, very good. Ink trickled down Athos's nose, off its tip, and into his mouth, where he could _feel_ it mingling with the wine-lees to stain his teeth even further.

"Aramis..." he said with a good deal less glee and a great deal more threat.

Aramis raised an eyebrow. And smiled. Nicely.

Athos crossed the room in the space of time it took that infuriating smile to blossom into real amusement, and hit him in the jaw.

Aramis, naturally, hit him back. In the throat. With just enough force to incapacitate and not enough to damage in any meaningful way.

"Not. The. Face," he snarled, as Athos choked on indignation and lack of air.

Athos grabbed him by the wrist, pulled him to his feet, and bit him, _hard_ , on the already-shading bruise that mottled the pale jawline with darkening reddish-blue.

" _Ghoul,_ " Aramis snarled.

"Oh, dead, are you?" Athos rasped out, and was silenced by the simple fact that Aramis had taken the opportunity to bite back in return, the taste of old coins flooding his mouth as his skin split open beneath the unloverlike pressure on his -- _damn it_ \-- upper lip.

That was going to be impossible to explain.

"Undead, for I thrive on blood," Aramis retorted, completely uncaring of potential difficulties, and yanking at the laces on Athos's shirt. "And skin. I'll peel it and use it for parchment."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Athos approximated, in much the same state himself as the would-be poet, biting down on the tender inside of Aramis's lower lip, and the taste of warm blood and colder ink and residual wine mingled on his tongue as he returned the lacing-favour to Aramis's breeches.

"Shut up altogether," Aramis snarled, red-toothed and feral and wonderfully, fantastically uncontrolled. He curled his fingers hard into Athos's hair, and pushed his head down to meet his hands at the point where those unbelievably recalcitrant breeches were finally opened.

For once, Athos was more than happy to oblige. He did, after all, have his mouth more than full by that point.

Later, as they lay on the floor in a wreckage of papers and ink and overturned chairs, Athos yawned and stretched and suggested –

"You could always write a translation."

Aramis bit his hip, lazily teasing rather than with any intent, pressed his blunt nails into the small tender spot he left, and murmured an enquiry.

"You have an intrinsic feel for Catullus," Athos clarified, and this time, _this time_ , Aramis laughed without bitterness.

"Why, for afterwards I lay there wearied with effort, half-dead in the bed?"

"You? Effort? Oh no." Athos rolled his head from side to side in negation, the wood hard beneath his tender scalp. "No, no, something more kind, for you, who are always so very kind."

"I shudder to think." Aramis left off his ministrations, and raised himself up, looking down at Athos with a kind of amused affection that somehow hurt. 

"If anything was ever entrusted by a friend to a silent sure one, whose loyalty of spirit is deeply known, you’ll find I’m equally bound by that sacred rite," Athos said, his eyes closed against that too-revealing gaze.

He was therefore more than a little surprised when he was kissed, not with intent, but with a closed-mouth gentleness that he would usually have been prepared to mock.

But this time – this time he could not.

"Do you think I could speak ill of my own life?" Aramis flickered the words out with cool air against his bruised lips, and followed them with another kiss, a little blood-tasting still, and full of an utterly encompassing demand.

"Insatiable," Athos said, but he did not let the bitterness of his laughter escape him.

He opened his eyes, and saw nothing but a man above him, no muse-driven poet or half-wild succubus, but a man, and a familiar one, and his entire.

He did not deserve it.

He could not deny it.

"Monstrous," Aramis agreed, and straddled him, bare-arsed and sinew-corded, his eyes creased with lust and mirth.

And Athos, who knew what generosity should look like, gladly took what he was being offered.


End file.
